ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability held its World Congress which takes place every three years in Montreal this June. Within the conference, ICLEI Council announced a new strategic vision for tackling the development challenges of today’s urban era. The vision, outlined in the ICLEI Montreal Commitment, scales up ambition for sustainable development and charts a path towards systemic urban change. The pathways identified by ICLEI to be the central part of the strategic vision resonates very well with JPI Urban Europe’s ambition of supporting city administration in their efforts towards a sustainable and liveable urban future.

In this light, it was especially a pleasure to be invited by the Future Earth Montreal Secretariat to speak and exchange with the audience (city administration, researchers, research funders and practitioners) in a session on “Building up science in cities to drive action on the SDGs”. The session focussed on the needs for science, research, and technology to support national governments.  Strengthening knowledge infrastructures at local and regional level is seen as essential to drive the localisation of the SDGs. JPI Urban Europe strongly supports the application of Urban Living Labs in its funded projects which have been proven successful in bringing together research, policy making and urban practitioners to co-create answers to urban challenges. Furthermore, we experiment with new funding instruments like the Innovation Action, which was piloted in the Making Cities Work Call. This instrument aims at putting city administration in the driving seat. The experience so far show, that Urban Living Labs and new instruments such as the Innovation Action are methods to leverage research and science for local and regional actors.

However, the discussion in the session showed that, despite the good examples for successful science-policy cooperation to support the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, challenges for a research programme such as JPI Urban Europe remain to take the next step:

• What formats do city administrations need to more intensively engage in research and innovation?
• What are the main barriers for city administration to engage in research and innovation?
• How can we support policy makers and public authority to operationalise knowledge and apply evidence based results?
• What framework conditions are required to support the uptake of evidence based findings in urban practice?

If you are interested in exchanging on these issues via mail, please feel free to contact me:

Johannes Riegler – Johannes.riegler@jpi-urbaneurope.eu